No subject

their Red Hat systems.  I've never experienced this myself.  Perhaps
I'm overly conservative in what I do.

David> When you get a deb package from the debian archives (or mirror)
David> in a stable branch, you cannot install the package improperly
David> even using dpkg, something which (as far as I know at least)
David> cannot be said about rpm (the program, not the package format).

I think there is a simple rule to follow: don't ever use --nodeps.
Maybe the people who mess up their systems break this rule.
Personally, I never do, but then I place a high value on keeping my
machine working constantly, as I use it every day for my work.  I'm
also pretty careful about installing packages from sources -- for
instance I always make a new install tree rather than using
/usr/local.

David> I'll be the first to admit I don't have as much experience with
David> RedHat as I do Debian, but the experience I *do* have shows
David> that you can dig yourself into a far deeper hole in RedHat than
David> in Debian

I've used both Red Hat and Debian.  Lately I use Red Hat more; my
laptop runs Debian but I don't use it as much.  My experience is that
if you pay attention, you rarely get yourself into a hole with either
distribution.  In fact I can't remember causing fatal problems on any
of my installations dating back to '96.

I find there are pros and cons to both distributions.  They fill
different niches in many ways.  I'd go ahead and enumerate some of
them here, but I've already done that several times on this list.
Those interested can search the archives.

Tom